The top-security mental hospital that has housed Moors murderer Ian Brady for nearly 30 years is displaying “misplaced paternalism” by objecting to his demand to be transferred to prison, his lawyer has claimed.
The mental health tribunal in Manchester investigating the application from the 75-year-old Brady – who with Myra Hindley killed five children in the 1960s – will announce its decision next week, it said yesterday.
Rejecting arguments from Ashworth mental hospital that he is not fit to be transferred, Brady’s barrister Nathalie Leiven said: “Why is Ashworth fighting so hard to keep him in hospital when the cost to the public purse is enormous and the benefit to him is little?”
Brady has been held at the Merseyside maximum-security hospital since 1985 when he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act following nearly two decades in a succession of top-security prisons around Britain.
“The regime at Ashworth is one that Mr Brady hates, in his eyes being spied upon by staff all day every day to prove that he is mentally ill. He wants the more honest, as he would describe it, regime of prison,” Ms Leiven said.
He had been happy in Ashworth for a decade until he was forcibly moved without warning by warders wearing helmets and riot-gear in a “‘watershed’ incident that left him injured”, she told the tribunal. Brady has been on an intermittent hunger strike since 2000 and is frequently fed through a tube. He has said he wants to be transferred to prison so he can starve himself to death.
Barrister Evelyn Grey, representing Ashworth, rejected Brady’s claims that he is sane: “There is overwhelming evidence that he has a personality disorder and it is chronic. The degree and severity is not in doubt. The core disorder is not really treatable.”
Brady has consistently refused to engage with doctors, while he frequently barges into staff only to blame his actions later on poor eyesight. There was “clear and overwhelming evidence” that he is antisocial and narcissistic.
